


The Long Night

by Azzy



Category: Tintin - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Apocalypse, Friendship/Love, Horror, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-21
Updated: 2012-01-21
Packaged: 2017-10-29 22:13:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/324733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzy/pseuds/Azzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>No, the dark is not their friend; but then, in this desolate world, it seems that few things are.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Night

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt requesting zombie!fic over at the [Tintin Kink Meme](http://tintin-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1701.html) on Dreamwidth.

_**Marlinspike Hall, May 27th, 1928**_

“Have you heard the news?” Tintin asks, early one spring morning when the sun is seeping in golden splendour through the curtains, dust motes spiralling lazily through the air. Haddock, grumbling, reaches for the newspaper and reads in silence for a while. There are toast crumbs on his sleeve.

“Fairy stories,” he says eventually, and reaches for the butter, which is beginning to melt. Prisms dance against the far wall as he picks up the glass dish. “Hope we're not gallivanting off to Romania, Tintin.”

“Oh,” Tintin says, “I thought I'd go and have a look.”

Silence. The Captain chews steadily while Tintin drums restless fingers on the tabletop. Snowy circles their chairs, and then flops down into a patch of sunlight with a little  _oof_  of enjoyment. “Romania,” the Captain says eventually. 

“Yes, Captain. Would you like to come?”

“Festering freebooters, do I look like I want to come to Romania?”

“But Captain, it does seem so odd.” Tintin picks up the paper again. “And you know the Professor went to Eastern Europe on that top-secret mission for -”

“All right, all right,” Haddock grumbles. “Mark my words, lad, no good will come of it.”

 

 _**Romania, June 1st, 1928** _

“There,” Haddock breathes into Tintin's ear, and Tintin jumps. “Look. By the lights.”

Gaslights flicker still on a street corner, fairly recently lit; there is a faint sound, over the noise of a nearby owl calling in the woods behind the village, a scratching, dragging sort of sound that sets his teeth on edge. Tintin holds his breath, feels Haddock's grip on his wrist tight enough to bruise. The wall of the building they are pressed up against is damp from the mist that so often hangs around these mountain villages.

They have had a lot of practice at hiding.

The train from the border had stopped two weeks earlier in a whine of protesting steel just outside Bucharest, hissing to a halt; the few passengers had got out of the carriages in hushed silence. There was a barrier across the railway; a freight train lying half-derailed, coal spilling from its upturned carriages. Of any driver there was no sign at all.

“Great thundering typhoons,” the Captain had said explosively, and had then fallen silent. Tintin, looking around at the sprawling outskirts of the city, devoid of life save themselves and the few passengers, had thought of the news reports and how exciting it had all seemed.

 _Terror Sweeping Across Romania_. All of them had been nebulous.  _Thousands Die as Mystery Plague Infection Spreads_. Tintin can remember the way his heart had leapt at the idea of another mystery to solve, back before he'd ever heard the stories from those fleeing, back before he'd picked his way through decomposing corpses and blood-spattered houses.

They had moved away from Bucharest. A city full of the dead was unlikely to talk.

The revenant when it rounds the corner must be freshly turned; it looks up at them through dead eyes and says, “ _Va rog_...” through broken teeth and jaw and dirty bone, and Haddock makes a harsh guttural noise and shoots it in the head, once, twice, three times. The thing falls backwards and they stand gazing at it in horror as the retort from the gunshot echoes from empty buildings.

“We should leave,” Haddock says, shouldering the gun, and Tintin nods and looks away because suddenly he feels ill and petrified and there is something far too close to a scream rising in his throat, no matter that he's seen them fall many times before. “Tintin? Come, lad. We have to head back to the border.”

They weren't letting anyone out at the border, not any more. Tintin remembers that. “If we can, Captain,” he says, and his voice is remarkably steady in his own ears. Then he hears another  _scrape scrape drag_ , a low-voiced hissing moan from the main street, and clenches his hand tight around his own gun. “We need to run.”

Running, they reach the edge of the town; then they set off down the road. Once they pass what was once a stagecoach by the edge of the forest; it has overturned, the horses long disappeared, and they walk past it on the opposite side of the road, scarcely daring to breathe. 

Tintin stumbles occasionally as he walks, because Snowy is pressed against his legs, tripping him every so often; the Captain offers his hand and Tintin takes it without question, feeling hard callouses and warmth and remembering something more living and vital than these cold dead places under the lonely mountains.

There is no moon as they plod onward down the road; a high thin covering of cloud cuts off all but the most greyish light. A survivor they met the week before told them that the darkness meant the revenants would be able to surprise them more easily. “They do not hunt by sight,” he had said; once a doctor, he'd bound up the gash in Haddock's arm and had spoken French much more efficiently than Tintin's Romanian. “Not by sight, no, by hearing and by smelling and by some sense that they have come by perhaps from the Devil himself.”

That man had been forced to shoot his own wife, and had told them the tale in a voice that barely wavered but broke at the end, when they comforted him as best they could. They had parted for safety; large numbers travelling together were not wise, and Tintin and Haddock and Snowy were at that point still heading deep into the abandoned countryside, still hoping to find answers.

No, the dark is not their friend; but then, in this desolate world, it seems that few things are.

 

 _**June 11th, 1928**_

Tintin has Snowy beside him and the Captain at his back, all of them panting, peering through the gloom under the trees. “Let the blackguards come,” the Captain snarls. 

“A worrying sentiment, Captain,” says Tintin, “but one that I do agree with.”

There are around ten revenants, which is smaller than many of the bands they have skirted in the last few weeks but still enough to outnumber the three of them. They are emerging from the trees into the clearing now, the wet rattle of air from torn throats a sign of their excitement. They are all big, despite the stooping caused by the infection, and all were once male; a band of woodsmen, perhaps. “Come on, then,” Haddock shouts at the corpses lumbering towards him, and lifting his gun fires the first shot.

As always, this enrages them. Tintin braces him self and fires as the revenants from his side of the clearing start running towards him, inhumanly fast; his first shot does not catch the leader in the head, only the shoulder, but the second catches it square between the eyes and it falls. Then the others are upon them and Snowy erupts from beside him, flinging himself at the tallest revenant with teeth bared, barking ferociously.

It's not the most sophisticated battle plan, but it seems to be working so far.

The gun makes a good club; Tintin swings it at a revenant that charges towards him from the left, and scores a solid hit that sends it crashing to the ground like a felled tree. Haddock roars something about abominations behind him, and Tintin swings around to his right and catches one under the chin with the butt of the gun; Haddock smashes it from behind, and they nod grimly to one another as it falls to the floor.

Snowy trots towards them, blood dripping from one ear but otherwise unharmed. There are no more revenants.

“Lucky,” Tintin says brusquely, shouldering his gun.

“We should head for the mountains,” Haddock says, wiping some unpleasant and unidentifiable substance from his forehead. “They don't like the high ground.”

“Of a certainty, they do not.”

They both whip around at the sound of a strange voice, and Snowy snarls a warning as a man steps out from the trees, his hands raised. “Who are you?” Tintin demands.

“I heard the noise.” The man raises his eyebrows; he is well-dressed if dirty, and his French is passable. “If you despatched these then you are most impressive, I think. Will you all come back with me? We form a big group, we head for the border.”

“Why should we trust to numbers?” Haddock growls.

“Because, friend, we hear tell of a great mass of the revenants moving. Perhaps they are driven by the army, but I do not wish that we are caught in their path.” The young man spreads his hands and shrugs. “Do what you will, but even you could not survive alone.”

Haddock and Tintin share a glance. “All right,” Tintin says, and lowers his gun; moving forward he holds out his hand, and feels an odd smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “I'm Tintin, and this is my companion, Captain Haddock. I'm – I'm a journalist.”

“Then I hope,” the young man says, not smiling as he shakes their hands one by one, “that you have written something down, Mr Tintin, for in days to come no one will wish to believe what we have all seen.”

 

 _ **June 19th, 2918** _

There are far too few of them to make a go of it this time.

Tintin draws in a deep breath and checks his ammunition. Three rounds; one for the revenant, one for the next – they always seem to know to move in pairs – and one for – 

He shakes his head. One for luck.

The irregular crashes from outside are growing more frenzied. Around him, the men hiding with them in this dank cellar are silent; they have all said their prayers a long time ago. Snowy is silent too but for the lowest of rumbling growls, a white ghost-shadow with old blood speckling his coat, teeth bared in a quivering snarl; he's still as a pointer, nose to the barricaded doorway. Tintin thinks of the blood outside and the dying hands reaching for him and feels only a kind of bleakness.

Haddock is saying something to him, and Tintin blinks up at him dumbly. Haddock's face is harder, sterner, in this dim cellar; the lines seem to have set grimly into place, and the smile is gone from his eyes. A strip of bright moonlight from the slatted window falls across his face at a rakish angle. “Lad,” Haddock is saying quietly. “Will you try to run?”

For a second Tintin doesn't understand, and then he is furious. “Run?” he hisses. “You want to run, now?”

Haddock looks down, and then away. “No, Tintin,” he says, and there is no bluster in his voice. “No. I want you to run, d'you hear me?”

The fury turns to strangling ice in his throat. “No,” Tintin says. “Never. I'm not leaving you.”

Haddock looks at him again and Tintin remembers Tibet, remembers the Captain with the knife in his hand cutting himself loose to save Tintin's life, and wonders why he never thought so much before of what it means to die for another person. What it really, truly means. “You are,” Haddock says. “One way or another. Confound it, boy, will you see reason?” 

“No,” Tintin says obstinately.

The Captain takes a deep breath, and kneels down beside him. This close, Tintin can see the dirt on his face, on the torn collar of his shirt, and new love and terror makes his hands shake as they reach out to straighten the stained material. “What makes you think I can watch you die?” Haddock asks, quietly enough that the others cannot hear, even if they had been able to speak French. “Thundering typhoons, Tintin, I'd rather -”

“No,” Tintin manages to say, and reaching out wraps his arms around the Captain, presses them awkwardly together with the cold metal of the gun between them and feels the frienzied beating of both of their hearts. “We'll face it together, Captain, you and me.”

 

 _**June 20th, 1928** _

The moments after a battle are the worst, always, when the madness of movement and frenzied action stops and is replaced by the madness of _thinking_.

Tintin barely recognises Haddock's face.

“I didn't feel his teeth,” the Captain slurs when Tintin, panting and terrified, rolls him over in the blood-stained dust. The shirt that Snowy tugs upon to help has been ripped from his back, and the skin from one side of his face. “R-rotten-footed revenants, foul – foul -” his head lolls back in Tintin's hands. 

“No, Captain, no, no, you mustn't, you can't -”

“Listen, boy.” Haddock reaches out to grip Tintin's arm, and Tintin isn't sure whether the distressed noise is his own or Snowy's, shivering beside him. “Y-you can't take the chance, you know that. The other's'll, th-they'll have your head if, if you don't -”

“I am not shooting you,” Tintin hisses, then screams it for good measure. “I am not, I won't, I won't -”

“I never felt his teeth, the lily-livered lubber,” the Captain murmurs again. “No bite marks, doesn't mean the beast didn't get me.”

“Then you weren't bitten, Captain, you can't have been bitten. You can't!”

“Did we win?” Haddock glances around hazily.

“J-just, there were fewer of them than, than we thought, not the main group, and – and the other men we met last week arrived and they helped -”

“You didn't leave,” Haddock says. His voice is growing fainter. “Of course you didn't leave, eh?”

“Please, Captain,” Tintin says, and he's begging; he'd never thought he had it in him to beg. “Don't. I'll take you, I'll hide you in the woods, I'll come back, you're not turning, you're  _not_.”

“My dear friend,” the Captain murmurs, and his eyes slide shut and he looks even less like himself, raw flesh without that familiar gleam of blue. “Promise you'll leave this time? Don't let me hurt you.”

Tintin swipes at the tears running down his own face. The Captain isn't turning, they will not be parted this way; he knows that deep in his bones, but still the tears come. “You won't hurt me,” he whispers, and then grim determination turns his bones to steel and dries his eyes. “I'll hold them back. I'll keep you safe.”

 

 _ **June 21st, 1928. Midsummer's Day**_.

The sun rises slowly, majestically, upon a wasteland of dust and nightmare.

On a hilltop, a figure pauses silhouetted against the light, shifting the gun in its hand. There is a band of men following him, winding up the hill in a long line, their weaponry glinting. The figure, perhaps a boy, raises a hand to his eyes to block out the rising sun, and he must see the army that waits over the ridge, a slow-moving morass of broken bodies and teeth that gape in answer to his unintentional salute; and perhaps, beyond, the hope of salvation.

The boy - who is no longer a boy - looks back down the hill towards the unmoving expanse of the forest, the sunlight turning his hair to a red, red flame.

Behind him, the world brightens second by second.

He turns, and walks on, into the pitiless light.


End file.
